Kayaking Safety - The EssentialsWatch this short video to learn how youcan insure that your paddling experiencewill be relatively safe for all involved.Training Canoe Newbies Over the years, Cliff Jacobson has formed afew tests to get new canoeists ready to run whitewater rivers. Read all about them.

Night is falling fast, ushered in by a freezing
squall. Your numb fingers fumble as you struggle to rig your tarp.
Suddenly, the textbook paragraphs describing the early signs of
hypothermia take on a terrible urgency. It's been a long day, and you're
running on empty. A hot meal is what you need, and the quicker the better.
Luckily, you've got a couple of cans of soup in your pack. That hot meal
you're craving is only minutes away.

Sound familiar? Maybe not. Canned foods are rarely found in paddlers' packs
these days. And for good reason. They're often salty and high in all the fats
your doctor told you to avoid. They're heavy, too, and if that weren't enough,
they're illegal in many parks and reserves. Anyone who remembers the days when
popular campsites were carpeted with rusting cans will understand why. Still,
it's not as if banning cans has put an end to litter, is it? Plastic bags,
discarded aluminum-foil packets, and tangles of monofilament
are now common sights in the backcountry. Of course, the law's the law. If
cans are banned where you paddle, that's that. Elsewhere, however, canned
foods may warrant a second look, even if this does cause some members of the
modern incarnation of the Go-Light Brotherhood to raise their eyebrows. After
all

Canned Foods Have History on Their Side

You could even say they're "traditional." Early explorers lived off the
land. Or else. They carried few staple foods
other than ship's
biscuit, salt pork or pemmican, dried peas, beans, and "Indian" corn. So
when canned foods first became widely available in the mid-nineteenth century,
they were greeted with great enthusiasm, particularly by seamen and arctic
explorers. But the early cans concealed a deadly secret: their imperfectly
soldered seams leached lead, and lead poisoning probably contributed to
several tragedies, one of them being the catastrophic failure of the final
Franklin Expedition.

In time, however, manufacturing techniques improved, and canned food became
a mainstay of household pantries. It was cheap, tasty, and easy to prepare.
Most important of all, it didn't spoil. My paternal
grandfather (Gramps, to all his grandchildren) lived through the Great
Depression. He was one of the lucky ones: he kept his job. In fact, he
prospered, selling dry goods to ritzy hotels around the country. But the
experience of seeing thousands of starving men and women begging in the
streets of America's cities left a lasting scar. His basement shelves groaned
under the weight of enough canned food to feed the whole family for six
months. And though my other grandfather
 I always called him Grandad  lived a very different life, guiding
"sports" in search of trophy trout in the southern Adirondacks, he, too, found
canned foods irresistible. Grandad never set out for one of his backcountry
camps without filling a pack basket
with cans: condensed
milk, soups, meats, and
hearty stews, not to mention canned vegetables and fruit. Under Grandad's
stern tutelage, I caught the bug myself. To this day, I know of few treats to
rival canned peaches.

If this seems strange, it's probably because paddlers today have so much to
choose from. But that wasn't always the case. In Grandad's time

There Simply Weren't Many Alternatives

When I was a kid, dehydrated meals were a rarity. Sure, we had dried
fruits like raisins and prunes, and dry staples like macaroni and rice 
and you could get sliced, dried beef in jars (perfect for creamed chipped beef
on toast). There were instant potatoes, too, though they tasted a lot like the
box they came in. And of course we had tea bags and
coffee,
ground to order in the A&P and carried home in a heavy paper sack, not to
mention dry cereals and crackers. But dehydrated meals? Nope. The mainstay of
most camping menus was canned food. Period.

Then, sometime in the '60s, dehydrated and freeze-dried meals started to
make their appearance in outfitters' catalogs, and I was an early adopter.
Freeze-dried foods were light and compact. They didn't taste all that great,
admittedly, but at least the label on the package suggested restaurant fare.
And they were expensive. This, too, was a plus. Of sorts. Does that
puzzle you? You're not alone. It had me scratching my head, as well. Until I
came across John McPhee's
explanation, that is. Freeze-dried meals, he once famously observed,
create "a sense of hardtack and pemmican within a gourmet context." In other
words, the high price was part of their appeal. Not everyone was quick to jump
on the bandwagon, however. Neither of my grandfathers warmed to these latest
offerings from the food industry's labs. Gramps, who often boasted that he'd
"eat anything, once"  and who dined on Alpo® to silence a skeptic
on one memorable occasion  decided that he preferred dog food to my
freeze-dried beef stroganoff. "Alpo's a damn sight cheaper, too," he growled,
before heading off to the cellar for some canned ravioli. My Adirondack-guide
Grandad was more taciturn, but no less dismissive. When I laid my freeze-dried
treasures before him, he merely snorted with contempt, refusing to believe
that such insubstantial grub could keep any real woodsman going for long.

I wasn't discouraged. I put this chilly reception down to the intransigence
of old age. Eventually, though, I began to come round to my grandfathers' way
of thinking. Why? Simply put

It's Hard to Argue With Success

When you need a hot meal  right now  you'll welcome the
pour-and-heat convenience of canned foods. Take a can. Add a can opener, a pot, and
a portable
stove. The result? A meal. Cooking doesn't get much simpler than this. If
time really presses, you can always eat the contents of the can cold. Hot or
cold, canned food is still fuel. And many cans today don't even need an
opener. So you can leave your Swiss Army knife in your pack. But cans are
heavy, right? Yep. They are. Very. Canned foods are often packed in water, and
water's not
light. On the other hand, a lot of weekend canoeists and kayakers can't drink the
water they paddle in, and field
water-purification methods can't eliminate many chemical contaminants, or
make salt water fresh. If you paddle where you can't drink the water, you
might as well bring some of what you need in the form of canned foods. The
bottom line? Water doesn't weigh any more when it's in a can.

At least you'll have plenty of choices. Stews and pasta meals (spaghetti
and ravioli, for example) are long-time favorites, but I've recently explored
the potential of ready-to-eat soups. These add-no-water offerings fill almost
half an aisle at the local HyperMart, and some of them now boast reduced fat
and sodium. Alternatives range from chowders to broth, with just about
everything in between. I have no trouble stocking my weekend getaway pack
with enough variety to ensure that I'm never bored  though if there's
time at the end of a long day, I still like to spice up my meals. Try it
yourself by adding a pinch of curry powder and a few dried
apricots to a beef and barley soup. Or crumble some dried sage and bacon
bits (the real thing or a soy substitute) into smoky chicken and corn chowder.
And "Italian wedding soup" can be made even more substantial if you bring it
to a boil with some extra water, then add a handful of instant
couscous to the pot. In a couple of minutes, stew's on.

But nothing ever comes from nothing, and canned foods aren't for the lazy.
Once you've eaten your meal, you've still got the can to deal with. The
remedy? You've heard it before:

If You Carried It in Full, You Can Carry It out Empty

No canoeist or kayaker can avoid noticing the spreading blight of litter in
the backcountry  or along the highways leading to the put-in, for that
matter. Many rural roads in the Adirondacks now resemble strip landfills. The
problem isn't limited to northern New York, of course, and no conscientious
paddler anywhere will want to add to the growing piles of rubbish that are
blowing in the wind. Luckily, it's easy to be part of the solution. Just rinse
your cans out, crush them, and store them in an airtight bag or hard-shell
container. (The latter is better in bear country.) Then pack them out for
disposal or recycling at home. Better yet, pick up some of the trash left by
others and bring it out, too. It's not much work, and it's worth it. You'll
probably want to come back someday, and you won't be happy if a favorite
campsite looks like a garbage dump when you return.

What goes around comes around, and this is as true of good things as bad.
In my case, I've come round to appreciating the virtues of canned foods once
again. Yes, cans are still heavy and bulky, and they're illegal in many places
where we paddle. But anywhere they're permitted, it's comforting to know that
dinner's in the can, whatever the whims and vagaries of the weather. And
that's alimentary.